Their Divine Fires

A captivating and intimate debut novel interwoven with folktale and myth, Wendy Chen’s Their Divine Fires tells the story of the love affairs of three generations of Chinese women across one hundred years of revolutions both political and personal.

In 1917, at the dawn of the Chinese revolution, Yunhong is growing up in the southern china countryside and falls deeply in love with the son of a wealthy landlord despite her brother’s objections. On the night of her wedding, her brother destroys the marriage, irrevocably changing the shape of Yunhong’s family to come: her daughter, Yuexin, will never know her father. Haunted by a history that she does not understand, Yuexin passes on those memories to her daughters Hongxing and Yonghong, who come of age in the years following Mao’s death, battling the push and pull of political forces as they forge their own paths. Each generation guards its secrets, leaving Emily, great-granddaughter of Yunhong and living in contemporary America, to piece together what actually happened between her mother and her aunt, and the weight of their shared ancestry.

Drawing on the lives of her great-grandmother and her great-uncles--both of whom fought on the side of the Communists--as well as her mother’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, Wendy Chen infuses this gorgeous debut with a passion that will transport the reader back to powerful moments in history while bringing us close to the women who persisted despite the forces all around them. Both brilliant and haunting, it’s a story about what our ancestors will, and won’t, tell us.

Wendy Chen is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Unearthings. Her short stories, creative nonfiction, translations, and reviews have appeared widely in such publications as Freeman’s, A Public Space, North American Review, and American Poets. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and has been adapted into musical compositions. Chen is also the editor of Figure 1 and the associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Quarterly. She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Most Promising Young Poet Prize. Chen earned her MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University and her PhD in English from the University of Denver. She teaches creative writing at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada.